The following relates to the document retrieval arts, document indexing arts, electronic mail (email) arts, and related arts.
Electronic mail (email) management is a common task for business management personnel, office assistants, scientists, engineers, and most other persons engaged in business, education, government, or non-profit activities. Email is also commonly used for personal activities, and users often maintain both business and personal email accounts. Email is efficient, enables transfer of files as attachments, facilitates cooperation across time zones or different work schedules via effective time-shifting, and so forth. Indeed, email is such an effective communication channel that a substantial problem is its overuse email users commonly receive dozens or even hundreds of email messages each day, and find it difficult to process this information overload.
Current email processing software offer a plethora of features for managing this influx of email messages, such as: junk email filtering, conversation viewing modes which group together email messages linked by reply or forward operations, indexed email search and folder management, and so forth. However, many of these features require substantial user input. For instance, the user who wants to organize folders needs to define the filtering rules that will apply to each new incoming message. These rules then require frequent manual updating, and the user may need to create, merge and remove folders in order to maintain a good structure in her mailbox.
Existing search functionality also exhibits various limitations. The search often consists of finding a match between the input query and an email message by using similarities based on “bag-of-words” representations of the query and messages (or even simply Boolean presence/absence models). Such search systems are only able to retrieve documents that contain matching keywords. These search systems also do not take into account the social information that may be available in email messages.